Chapter 15
Devine handed a cup of coffee to Harper and one to Fuss when they arrived to search Jenny Silkwell’s cottage. He’d purchased the drinks before he’d left Maine Brew.
They thanked him, and then looked dumbstruck when he told them that he had discovered Alex Stilwell sobbing outside her sister’s cottage last night.
“What was she doing here?” asked Fuss.
“She didn’t say. I guess she was upset about what had happened to her sister.”
Harper took a drink of his coffee and nodded. “I suppose that makes sense.”
“She might have also wanted to get into the cottage,” offered Devine. He wanted to see how the officers responded to that possibility.
Fuss cocked her head at him. “What, to get a keepsake or something, you mean?”
“Or something,” said Devine delicately.
“You mean, attempting to knowingly procure evidence from a homicide victim’s last known place of residence before it was processed by law enforcement?” said Harper like he was speaking in open court and striving to be absolutely precise with his language.
“Yes” was Devine’s simple response.
“It was locked and covered with police tape.”
“She wouldn’t have known that until she got here,” pointed out Devine. “And how did she know this was Jenny’s cottage? Had they met here beforehand?”
Harper waved this query off. “Small town, she would have heard from someone. Maybe Pat told her.”
“How did she appear, other than the crying?” asked Fuss. “Did you speak to her?”
He gave a shorthand account of their conversation, leaving out Alex’s comment about her perhaps not-so-wonderful sister. But he did tell them how she had put him in his place.
“Yeah, that sounds like Alex,” proclaimed Fuss.
Harper said, “Shall we get to the search?”
“Do you have the keys to her rental?” asked Devine.
“They were in the cottage. I made a quick check before I secured it,” replied Harper.
They did the rental vehicle first. It had a new car smell, and there was not a single thing of Jenny’s in it. And they pulled up the liner in the trunk, looked under the car, in the wheel wells and under the floorboards and seats, and even in the engine compartment and tailpipe.
“Let’s head inside,” said Harper. Devine was grateful to get out of the cold.
The chief cut the police tape and unlocked the door with the one-pound slug key. Devine asked if the key had been found on Jenny’s body.
“No,” said Harper. “But Pat gave me this master key. Well, let’s get to it.”
They found a small carry-on roller next to the bed. It contained only clothes and a pair of sneakers. The bathroom had her toiletry bag with some of the items laid out neatly on the sink. She had been here only the one day, arriving early, so the bed had not been slept in. There was no briefcase. They did find her purse with her wallet in it. But no laptop or phone.
“You have the clothes she was found in?” asked Devine.
“Back in the evidence locker at the station,” said Fuss.
“Got a list on you?”
She pulled out her phone and clicked through some screens. She held it out to him.
He read off, “Parka, jeans, sweater, boots, socks, underwear.” He looked up. “Personal effects?”
“Just the two rings, necklace, and the Breitling watch I mentioned before. And now that we found her purse and wallet here we can definitely rule out robbery.”
“What about a phone? Everyone carries a phone.”
“We found no phone on her person,” said Fuss.
“So since it’s not here presumably someone took it?”
“Or it got washed away when she fell onto the rocks,” said Harper. “Like we told you, by the time we got there she was damn near floating.”
Devine didn’t buy this but didn’t comment.
Harper looked around. “Well, there’s nothing much here. We’ll bag and tag what is.”
“You don’t want to call in a forensics team?” said Devine.
“The closest one I know of that’s any good is at least two hours away,” Fuss pointed out. “And this is not the crime scene. If we had found something obvious — blood or signs of a struggle, for example — we would call them in. But this isn’t the big city, Devine. No CSI here. Resources are limited and police budgets are tiny. We can’t snap our fingers and these folks suddenly appear, even for a priority case like this. Everyone’s busy, and they already sent extra people out on it.”
“That much crime around here?”
“You’d be surprised. It’s just spread over a wide area. There are fewer and fewer jobs, fentanyl use is through the roof. People are just fed up with being crapped on and everyone around here has guns, lots of them. Not a good combo.”
“Putnam looks like it’s doing okay.”
“A few nice shops and a new bar and some fancy restaurants do not make for a paradise for everybody,” interjected Harper. “Fishing still drives this part of Maine, and the fishing lately has not been all that good and it’s only expected to get more challenging.”
The two officers proceeded to methodically collect the woman’s personal possessions.
Devine watched them for a bit and then walked around the cottage. He was pretending it was part of an enclave of mud shacks outside of Kabul where they’d found a meticulously hidden IED processing operation. Or twenty clicks to the north of Dohuk, where an entire rural village had banded together to hide a top leader of ISIS. A thorough search had rooted him out and a shoot-out had followed, the intensity of which Devine had seldom seen. Every villager, even grandmothers and kids, had produced a variety of weapons, from old Soviet AK-47 assault rifles to Stechkin machine pistols, and opened fire. Devine’s team leader had had to call in reinforcements to eventually win the battle. And the ISIS leader had been killed in the ensuing melee, so they got no intel from him. And the confrontation had cost two American soldiers their lives, along with four kids and three elderly women.
Devine had thrown up after seeing the torn-apart bodies of the children and women. And he had not been alone.
He eyed the small desk set against the window, a duplicate of the one in his room. Bright sunlight was streaming in through the glass, and he stood directly in its path to gain some warmth. When he looked down at the desktop he saw it.
A slight dust pattern. The shape sure looked like the size of a laptop.
He ran the possibilities through in his head: Had Jenny taken it with her? Had her killer taken it from her? Or had her killer come here and taken it after she was dead, as he had speculated the previous night?
If they had taken her laptop and phone, he knew the security on each would be pretty much unbeatable.
But if they somehow got the passwords from her before they killed her?
There was up to several hours between Silkwell’s last being seen alive and her death occurring. A lot could have happened during that time.
Guillaume didn’t mention any traces of torture in the postmortem, but still. If our enemies now possess what she had on her laptop or phone?
He knew there were strict protocols and procedures for keeping classified information on government devices. And just like the private sector, much of it was stored in the cloud. But he also knew that some government employees took shortcuts, or didn’t always adhere strictly to the protocols.
He glanced over to see Fuss eyeing him cagily where he stood in the sunlight.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Just trying to stay warm.”
Fuss scoffed. “Try coming here in January.” She went back to work.